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I don't currently have a BPD diagnosis, but I have begun to strongly suspect I should. 20 years ago I was diagnosed as bipolar, and underwent various therapies for that, none of which ever seemed to do much good. I'd run across mentions of BPD in the past, and was recently told by someone that I certainly sounded more BPD than bipolar, and have spent some time researching it again online, which is how I found this site. I tend to score really high on the online tests I've found regarding BPD, and definitely meet the DSM IV criteria.

I was planning to ask a question along these lines in the general forum, but figured I should drop an introduction here first.

By the way, I'm a 37 year old male, living in the Pacific Northwest again, divorced, and most recently went very sideways after the end of a three year relationship with my last girlfriend.

Hi CaptS,

Welcome to you....glad you found us, and also glad you have been doing your research...knowledge is power. Take a look around the board, especially at the Tools to your left. Please post wherever and whenever you choose.

cosmo

Hello Capt,
I just soined also.
Self dx bpd also. I did quite a bit of research too.
I'm guessing, if you are here that you are looking for some help/support as am I. So far this is a wonderful place. I started using the tools a couple of days ago and have already improved relations with my SO.

BTW - I am a 42 yr old male, midwest, married 23yrs but it has been definately rocky esp lately

Hi there, Capt and howdy yourself!
Just joined myself a little while ago and have also partly voluntarily (sp? - stupid German that I am) incarcerated myself in the Pacific NW, Tacoma area.
I found myself described in the DSM IV, went to a psych dr and was finally being diagnosed after being treated for general weirdness and severe clinical depression for many, many years.
The BP idea does not surprise me since these two overlap in some areas.
I hope you will find some usefull stuff here, it feels good not to be alone, don't you think?

hiyas capt! another sarcastic? cool....

drama, you are not a stupid german. stop that girl! maybe we played a few hands of cards and didnt bluff enough, but we do the best we can today. i dont find you stupid at all.

now go write im not stupid 100 times on a blackboard, no copy and paste!!!! grins.... and yes, you spelled it perfectly.

Ha, i finally got it in writing that i am not stupid! I shall print it out and put it on my office wall. So I can point at it if accused accordingly!!!!!!!

Yeah, the cards are a good metaphor: my h dealt me these when losing my life at the blackjack and poker tables, he just passed them on to me!!!!!!! Genius that he is.............................

birgit

I am 38 and I now live in South King County in Washington state. Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavioral Therapy program originated in the Seattle area and I believe she still takes clients. I had considered trying her program but I have been told I don't have BPD after all. It might be worth looking into if you are not far from Seattle, although I think there could be a wait list.

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I am really trying to get a handle on things, and the more I've looked into it the more sense the idea that I am BPD makes. For weeks and months prior to this recent mention of borderline I have been struggling with my sense of identity in particular, and largely a mess in general. I've really managed to tear my life apart at this point, which is pretty much a common theme in my history. I'm hoping just talking about it and getting some of my thoughts in print will help to anchor the idea in my head, and make it harder for any particular mood swing or thought pattern to obliterate it. Considering I easily hit 7 out of the 9 symptoms on the DSM-IV it seems eerily accurate. Now if I can keep any persistence of vision perhaps I can go from there...

Thanks again for the replies, and I apologize in advance for any rambling or incoherence on my part. My head is not always my friend....

(By the way, I've used Captain Sarcastic as my online name for years and years - there are people who still call me that in person....)

i wish you the best in this path capt!

my pals and i have always called each other our online names in real also...i dont use my "real" online name here as my DIL could find me via a search. she has done it before. its on my yahoo tho....

incoherence is my friend, also lol...

I'd really like to write more, but I am utterly exhausted and my mind is going three ways at once right now. My life is such an incredible mess, and I keep going back and forth in my head asking myself how crazy am I really? Running over my past, trying to make any sort of sense of things. My mood doesn't seem stable for more than a few hours lately, and the best I can do sometimes is not try and think at all. That didn't work so well last night, hence three hours of sleep, if that. Also doing my best not to drink, as that has been my choice of self-destructive activities as well as my best escape from myself for some years now. I get really sick of being me sometimes.

Argh, I'm sorry to rant like that - I meant to just jot a couple sentences. It doesn't help that I have nobody to talk to honestly, and I've been having a hard time keeping a journal. And I'm sleep deprived pretty bad.

ARGH, I'll stop talking now...

I'm feeling better today - actually got some sleep, at least. I'll try to come up with a coherent way to frame my thoughts and ask about how best to do so, or even if I should. After the previous comment about people searching for usernames I am feeling a little paranoid about what I say since I have used this name for so long I am all over the place with it. Still, it's hard for me to worry that much about anything anymore, so maybe I won't bother trying to change it.

I've been reading posts from people here and on other boards with BPD and a great deal of it could have come from me. If I had insurance I would probably already have an appointment set up, but since I don't I am trying to deal with things on my own. Given the mood swings and cognitive dissonance I keep going through it's not always easy.

I'm going to try not to ramble on, and just leave a question - would it be inappropriate to run through some of my history and see if it sounds familiar to anyone, or is that too much and possibly too triggering? Sometimes it feels like I have been many different people and had many different lives, and the way I differ from day to day gets confusing.

Well, so much for not rambling...

don't worry, Capt, most of us will be able to relate to just about anything you say, lol.
BTW, you haven't been the least bit incoherent.

cosmo

i dont know where your at, but you could check for family services places. my counseling is free thru one here. some places have cost calculated on income also.

meds also can be free or discounted thru drug companies. a lot of drs will give samples or clinics.

your doing fine!!!! not incoherent to me at all either.

Alright, I've been thinking about writing a little more out, but have been hit by both my usual uncertainty and semi-rational fear of someone internet detectiving my name to find this, and also just not sure what is going on in my head. The more I have thought about it the more BPD seems to make sense, but then my mood shifts and I doubt it again or think I am sane but just not a very good person.

Anyway, I'll try to keep the rest of this as brief as possible and just hit the high points.

My childhood was more or less okay early on, although there was a little sexual weirdness that didn't really cross the line to abuse and that I am not going to elaborate at the moment. I was a precocious and outgoing kid, and early on got put in gifted classes.

When I was around 10 my parents got divorced, and at first had joint custody so my brother and I could continue at the same school. A year later my father decided to move to a small town out in the country, which required us to change schools and see my mother less frequently. There were issues with me and this school, but I won't go into detail right now. Then he decided, in a huge personality/goal shift, to stop being a lawyer and move to the East coast and work in investment banking.

This led to a custody battle between my parents, and I became the messenger between them - tell your mother this, tell your father that, and so on. It got to the point that my father showed me transcripts of a phone conversation with my mother which he tried to portray as showing that she thought I was so smart that she didn't understand me and was actually somewhat afraid of me. That was great, let me tell you...

Anyway, I told the judge I wanted to stay with my mother, and he disregarded this and awarded custody to my father, which led to us moving to the East coast along with his second wife and her daughters. Life there turned into hell, as this second wife hated me and did whatever she could to torment me without it being obvious abuse. For once I became shy at school and ended up even being bullied. During this time that marriage fell apart, Dad remarried a woman I actually really liked, then that fell apart. At the end of this time, the 6th and 7th grades for me, he decided to bring the second wife back, much to everyone's horror, especially mine. At this point he gave up custody and we moved back to the West coast to be with my mother.

Things I thought were starting to stabilize, and then my mother's second husband left her the Summer of my freshman year in High School. We had just dropped my brother off at the airport to go see Dad for the summer, as I didn't want to go, and that is when she told me. So I spent most of that summer being support for her during this second divorce.

I had been slightly depressed for quite a while, but it deepened in High School. By my sophomore year I started experiencing escalating anxiety, to the point I was nauseous on the ride to school every morning, then waking up with panic attacks, and finally agoraphobic. I felt as though all there was to me were different personas that I wore in dealing with different people and situations, and nothing inside behind them. I started to feel this nightmarish sense of unreality, like the world was 2 dimensional and if I looked around the wrong corner at the wrong time I would see that there was nothing behind the facade. I also had occasional red rages, but they were less often. It felt like I was literally losing my mind.

I knew that my father had been diagnosed as bipolar, so I did a little research and decided I was, too, and essentially demanded to be put on lithium. The psychiatrists I saw (I didn't mention it but I had seen a psychologist before the breakdown occurred, and it was not a positive experience - I can detail that some other time, perhaps) were happy to go along with the diagnosis and put me on xanax immediately followed by lithium. I also demanded no psychotherapy, and they assented to this, too, although in hindsight I don't see why. I have a bad tendency to be able to convince mental health professionals of just about anything...

Anyway, the breakdown eased, then passed, and I felt more stable again, but shocked and numb. The lengthy period of worsening depression and anxiety had taken its toll on my grades, and I was left with a terrible GPA but an impressive level of classes. I had been somewhat suicidal before the breakdown, and it actually worsened afterwards. I saw little point to continuing on, and this is where some of my recklessness really started.

Wow, I thought I could keep this short, and already it's so long I am embarrassed. I haven't even reached my issues with girls or the end of High School with this. And I am keeping this a bare thumbnail sketch, believe me.

I guess I will save this for right now, and at least not have several pages of post in one entry.

Sorry again, everyone...

One quick addendum to that incredibly long and poorly-written snapshot - I felt I should mention that by the time I went with the bipolar diagnosis I had not only read up on it, but had previously been reading psychology in general, especially Jung for the former and existentialism for the latter. It was Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" that helped keep me going for a while there...

Okay, I should sleep. My mood is surprisingly not that bad, although it is weird and probably not healthy. Been close to chain smoking lately...

It sounds like a childhood filled with instability, emotional abuse, and unmet developmental needs, all of which is a recipe for mental health problems in adulthood. Whether or not you technically qualify for a diagnosis of BPD is not information you can get from anyone but a professional, but certainly there are those of us who have experienced similar childhood themes.

We are all powerless over our pasts. What can you do right now, today, to help yourself start to achieve greater emotional stability? For instance, some of us have found that drinking leads to greater emotional dyscontrol, while eating healthy foods and getting enough sleep can start to build a foundation of physical health that can help us cope.

You're right, of course, and perhaps I shouldn't continue on writing - it just gets worse from there. I unfortunately have no insurance and next to no resources at the moment and would otherwise have probably already tried to see a doctor. At some levels, though, I'm not sure how much it matters anyway.

have you looked to see if your community has any family services places? or mhmr, with lowered fees?

i do a lot of inner child work and i will tell ya the board is quite mixed on that. some dont like it, some do, i guess its each their own choice.

you matter, capt sarcastic. yes, you do.

If you look on the left-hand side of the page, there's a box called "Tools." You can start to practice the tools today...they're free.

You also don't have to stop telling your history if you don't want to. However, my own experience is that when I put a lot of energy into reliving the past, even if it's to "share" with someone else, it ultimately doesn't help me move forward. The tools are a way to focus on the solution rather than the problem.

I will go through the tools more extensively, and am seeing what options I have here locally. I might write more, but right now my head is not in the right place. I was doing pretty well mood-wise today, and might actually be lined up for a promising job, but then an hour or so ago a family member managed to unintentionally send me sideways. The anger has subsided mostly, but now I am feeling off...

Sorry again for everything - I feel like an uninvited guest, and a poor one at that. If half the time it didn't feel like my head was packed with cotton maybe I would be doing better...

capt, you are def welcome here! i hope you will begin to feel more comfortable soon. it can be hard to learn the posting and feel safe in talking openly.

you can learn this. it is overwhelming at first, isnt it? but i am proof we can all learn and the tools work. i posted about it in a thread. it is work, for sure, but oh so nice when it all comes together.

best wishes,,,jody

I'm still around, but my mood has been very strange, and mostly alright, so I've been engaging in some general avoidance for a while. I'll take whatever break I can get from what goes on inside my head sometimes...

Still trying to riddle things out, but in my avoidant state I've let myself get a little dissociative, and somewhat grinningly apathetic. I was recently called nihilistic and realized the person was not far from the mark, and have been trying to pull myself back from that, with questionable success...

Sorry to just post a pointless note, but I am still thinking about all this...

Welcome. One note about this.



If you handled your anger healthily, you can ignore the next paragraph.

If you feel like maybe you could have done better, I would love to show you how one of the tools works.

It's called the five steps and for more info, it's a link on the left of this page.

I'm going to make up a situation to demonstrate.
(OK, it's from my own life.)

A friend said they would call to catch up today and it's late and they haven't called.

1.First is HALT

Yes, part of it is taking a minute to breathe. Do not just react to the situation, take time to think about it.

But during this step we also figure out if there may be contributing factors to our feelings. Are we Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired? Believe it or not we can fix these, and it can really help us respond to a situation more rationally.

2. Determine what the problem is.
I feel hurt because my friend didn't bother to call.

3.Come up with 3 possible course of action.

1. Get in a snit and write them off as a friend.
2. Get mad, call now even though its really late and they have a family, and scream at them.
3. Trust that they do care, maybe just got busy, wait until I have more information before deciding on a course of action.

4. Figure out what is best to do for now
This doesn't have to be an answer forever. The best course at this time. Things change so the right answer could change. And remember, as in my example, sometimes doing nothing is the right course of action.

I did #3.

and the fifth step, and sometimes the hardest...
DO IT!

I can often see the way I should do something, but I decide to let the feelings take over and do the wrong one anyway. No ones perfect, but If I take time to HALT, things usually go better for me.

I also found, especially when first learning about all of this, that working out these steps in hindsight on a situation I wish I would have handled better really taught me the value and got me in the habit of using the tools, so it became easier to think about it in the situation the next time.

Like I said, this may not have been a time where you needed this, but if it could help you feel better, thought I would try.

kari, may i ask you a ?

when you did #2 you stated "i felt hurt when my friend didnt call"

do you go deeper into this? as in why i feel hurt? what did it mean or represent? because i do....i wondered how deep you go into your feelings. hurt is a secondary emotion, like anger. (this is what my T taught me to do--dig)

for me, it isnt enough to feel hurt, i have to dig into why to untwist it. i find its easier on the 3 courses of action if i know why i feel hurt.

tyia*** jody

Sometimes I take that next step, if I start to see apattern where I keep getting hurt. In this example, if I always feel hurt when i feel abandoned, or think I'm being ignored, I would probably try and find the why for it. But sometimes, I just accept a feeling or a feeling, not truth, always fleeting, and just think about the proper behavior for the situation. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well. Part of my idea of happy healthy living is someday being at the point where I don't have to examine my every thought for days on end. I say it that way not because I think you do it, but I have a tendancy to. I just can't let something go. That I have to analyse and analyse (sp?) and sometimes that actually leads me to focusing on being sick instead of concentrating on living a normal life. But then there are also times where I get a positive result from the analysing. Using my example.
I am hurt this one time when a friend forgot to call.
I would probably chalk that up to a normal feeling that a healthy person might have too.
I am always hurt when I feel abandoned by people and it happens over and over.
I would probably explore that concept more and work the 10 forms of twisted thinking, or Ellens arrow technique, or just more thought on my part.

Does that make sense?